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Thousand Island Dressing
Add to Russian Dressing just before serving 1/4 cup cream, beaten stiff. 1921 CHILI SAUCE Force through food chopper 3 green bell peppers 1 red bell pepper and 4 large onions. Put in saucepan with 12 large tomatoes or 1 quart canned tomato 1 quart vinegar 1 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon oil of clove 1/4 teaspoon oil of cinnamon 3 tablespoons salt 3/4 teaspoon allspice 3/4 teaspoon mustard 3/4 teaspoon soda and 1 tablespoon table sauce. Cook until soft and rub through puree sieve, getting through as much as possible of the vegetables. Cook again until thick and of the desired consistency.
Two items run together here: the finish for Thousand Island dressing, and a chili sauce headed "1921." Read the dressing line first — it assumes you already have the book's Russian Dressing in front of you.
- The dressing is a two-line addendumWhip 1/4 cup heavy cream to soft-stiff peaks and fold it into the finished Russian dressing at the last moment. It will slacken and weep within an hour or two, which is why the original says just before serving.
- Cream then and nowCream in 1921 came without the stabilizers found in some modern cartons, and its fat content varied by dairy; modern heavy whipping cream at 36% fat is consistent and holds longer. Stopping just short of fully stiff makes the dressing less likely to turn grainy when folded.
- Food chopperA hand-cranked grinder with a coarse plate. A food processor pulsed in short bursts is the equivalent; there is no need to reduce it to a slurry, since the vegetables are sieved later in any case.
- Oil of clove and oil of cinnamonThese were sold as pickling flavorings in the period and are extremely strong; 1/4 teaspoon flavors the entire batch. Do not substitute a modern essential oil from a health-food shelf, which may not be food grade and is far more concentrated. Ground cloves and cinnamon, roughly a teaspoon each, sit closer to what the sauce should taste like.
- SodaThe 3/4 teaspoon of baking soda appears to be there to take the edge off a quart of vinegar. It will foam against the acid, so add it with the pan off the heat.
- Table saucePeriod shorthand for a commercial bottled condiment, most often Worcestershire. Worcestershire is a reasonable substitute.
- Puree sieveA conical sieve or food mill. A food mill with the medium plate does this in a fraction of the time and pushes through more of the pepper and onion pulp than a sieve and spoon will.
- Timing and consistencyThe recipe gives no times; both the first cooking and the later open reduction will take a considerable while at this volume. The finished sauce should mound softly on a spoon; it thickens further as it cools.
- Yield and keepingRoughly two to three pints. The recipe gives no canning process, so treat it as a refrigerator sauce — cool it, jar it, and keep it cold for a few weeks. Do not seal it into jars on the strength of these instructions; use a current tested recipe if you want shelf-stable chili sauce.
Thousand Island dressing is generally traced to the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the form given here is the familiar one: Russian dressing — mayonnaise reddened with chili sauce or ketchup — lightened with whipped cream. Oils of clove and cinnamon, called for here as a matter of course, were shelf stock for anyone who put up pickles and relishes in quantity, and were commonly sold by the dram at the druggist.